Current Position: Professor of Sociology, University at Albany, SUNY.
Brief Bio: Professor Yang’s substantive research interests are spatial demography, mortality, and health disparities. Specifically, he investigates whether, and if so, how social and built neighborhood environment factors explain the gaps in a range of health outcomes across racial/ethnic, geographic, and socioeconomic dimensions. His methodological interests focus on developing geographic information systems and spatial statistical methods. His current projects explore the determinants of breast and colorectal cancer patients’ care in Appalachia and investigate how an individual’s distrust of health care system and perceived discrimination contribute to health inequalities. Echoing his methodological interests, he is developing a probability-based randomization method to address the data sharing/confidentiality issue in social sciences and a spatial quantile regression method that simultaneously explores both statistical and spatial heterogeneity.
Penn State’s Demography Program: Penn State’s Demography Program not only provides strong methodological and substantive training to me, but also offers an interdisciplinary environment where I learned how to work with scholars from different disciplines. The Demography Program has prepared me for the challenges in career development.
Website: https://www.albany.edu/sociology/faculty/tse-chuan-yang
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